A Dance With Dragons
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
My Initial Thoughts after my first read of this long awaited book:
You'd think that after spending 6+ years writing a book, it would be one of the best, if not THE best books of the entire series. Alas, I rank it just above A Feast For Crows (the previous book of the series), the worst book in the series. I had given Martin a pass on Feast, as Dance With Dragons and Feast were originally going to be one book and after the story kept growing, Martin decided to split the story and was going to put the 'good' storylines in DWD. However, what we got were alot of extra storylines about minor characters and even new characters who I could care less about. All the awesome characters that he developed in the first couple of books, Bran, Arya, even Sansa, etc. are barely addressed if at all. I'm very, very, very dissappointed in these last two books of what started out as a great new series.
At this point I don't care about the series. I don't see how an author can write 1500 (Feast and DWD) pages and not have anything interesting happen, and have very minimal story progression. Martin's writing style is very frustrating to read when there are no interesting story arcs. Each chapter is a different viewpoint, so there is no continuity amongst the chapters. Then it seemed like in each chapter I was just reading what the character was monologuing in his head, or reading conversations people were having with each other. He also tends to use alot of the same phrases over and over again. which came across as lazy to me.
Also, one of the characters spent half the book thinking about how he had killed his father to the point that I was bored of reading this characters storyline. This storyline had historically been a good one too.
I believe Martin has fallen into the trap of introducing new characters and writing endlessly about things that are BORING! He needs to hangout with Brandon Sanderson to get a clue on how to progress his story.
Then there were a couple of chapters that seemed so disconnected from the rest of the story and the writing was sooo disinteresting that I couldn't believe that it had been allowed to be published. It made me wonder if the editor had fallen asleep herself while reading this story and had accidentally skipped these chapters and it wasn't reviewed properly.
I know I just went off, but it is just unbelievable to me that a writer, with as good as Martin has been, could spend 6+ years and 900+ pages on a book and have it turn out so subpar as this book is. (Taken from my Goodreads.com review)
I will write a more in depth review at some point.